gigrove to match skilled digitial workers & startups with spare rooms

Bootstrapping London-based startup gigrove is looking to carve out a niche in the collaborative consumption space as a matching platform for digital workers with itchy feet, and startups with a spare room and pressing skills need. Which is all very zeitgeisty in these digital nomad/citizen of nowhere times. While the team pushed out an MVP back in 2015, and opened up a beta last summer, founder and CEO Marko Islamovich says they’ve now launched fully the platform — and have just over 20,000 active users at this nascent stage; or around 5,000 startup hosts (spread across 130 countries), and nearly 17,000 traveling freelancers. The basic idea is for a freelancer to swap their skills in exchange for a place to stay, so they get to bootstrap their travel, while their host gets help with whatever task they’re looking for. The platform lets users offer a wide range of skills, from startup staples like UX/UI design to non-tech activities such as garden maintenance and cooking. But if you’re busy running a startup out of your home you might not have time to manage day-to-day household tasks yourself, so a live in cook might be just the thing you’re looking for. “We are noticing a huge change on how work is done,” argues Islamovich. “It’s becoming more project-based, more and more people work remotely from their homes. Understanding that startups have a lot of problems with human capital, (mostly due to insufficient funding) we decided to combine resourceful (accommodation) and useful (skills) and help accelerate those startup projects around the globe.” He says most of gigrove’s users are pre-seed and seed stage tech startups at this point, covering all sorts of different fields — be it fashion, healthcare, transportation, fintech and so on. “What’s common for all of them is that […]